Are people backing up the fediverse?

#fediverse

Most fediverse platforms are run by common users, not entities with either monetary, commercial, political or geopolitical interests to keep the platforms alive. But that also means the instances could disappear when money gets tight, if the interest dies out, if there are technical difficulties that are hard to deal with, etc.

This brings me to the opening question, are people taking at least what they find relevant from the fediverse, and backing it up on web archival services, or at least backing up locally as screenshots, HTML/MHTML files, etc., so if their instance or the propagated contents die, at least there is a register the content ever existed?

@fediverse@piefed.social

  • Lehmuusa@nord.pubEnglish
    17·
    8 days ago

    This apparently is a problem on Mastodon. But, the Forumverse (PieFed/Lemmy/MBin) has a design that mitigates this.

    See for example the case of lemm.ee. It went down. Yet, here’s an example of its content being live and (somewhat) kicking: https://lemmy.world/c/movies@lemm.ee .
    Their closure was known before, so communities names were appropriately changed.

    How the Forumverse works is that each instance that has at least one user subscribed to a comm makes a full copy of all of the comm’s text material whenever something gets published there. What, however, goes missing is the ability to propagate the content between instances. That would be the job of lemm.ee, in this case. If you now go and write a comment at https://piefed.social/c/movies@lemm.ee , it will never be visible when viewed from within other instances. In other words, whatever you comment there, will not be visible on https://lemmy.world/c/movies@lemm.ee, because you are not a user of lemmy.world and nobody’s there to federate the content.

    I wish Forumverse comms had some kind inheritance tag so that a comm could tell what instance should gain the right/responsibility to do the federation work if the comm’s original instance is confirmed to have gone belly-up. If that was done, comm’s would be essentially eternal. Now it’s a bit of a weird situation that you have comms that look completely existant and where it looks like you can even comment, but the comments won’t propagate anywhere.

    But the content is still there. If you subscribe to a community, it means all of that community’s text content (but not images!) will be backed up on your home instance’s server.

    • Auster@thebrainbin.orgOP
      3·
      8 days ago

      Small point, but about fetching posts from dead instances, I was able to do it previously by pulling comments’ direct links when the commenter is from an external instance. Just don’t remember if I did it from Lemmy or Mbin.

      • Lehmuusa@nord.pubEnglish
        9·
        8 days ago

        Nope. There’s no other way to fetch those posts than to view them through some instance that already has them. Things will get saved on a Forumverse instance from the moment someone subscribes to the community.

        Lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works and lemmy.zip are examples of instances that have existed for a long time and are well federated. Almost anything gets backed up by them, because almost any comm has users from those instances.

        • Auster@thebrainbin.orgOP
          2·
          8 days ago

          So it must’ve been Mbin then. All your examples list Lemmy-powered instances, and I did pull some posts through their comments.

          • Lehmuusa@nord.pubEnglish
            1·
            7 days ago

            You can manually pull individual posts on PieFed and Lemmy as well. But at least those two don’t have a “pull the whole post history” feature per se.

            Two PieFed instances do communicate the post history upon subscription. And, I think, comments as well? But PieFed cannot do that with Lemmy.